


A ghostly walk home

by asparagusmama



Series: Halloween bits and bobs [6]
Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Halloween, History, Oxford
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:33:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27291994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asparagusmama/pseuds/asparagusmama
Summary: On his walk home from the station one foggy Halloween Night, Hathaway encounters a few ghosts, first without realising, then trying to convince himself of the excellent costumes and tricks of the light, and finally, he has to accept, as others tell him, he has seen at least one ghost
Series: Halloween bits and bobs [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1987102
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	A ghostly walk home

Hathaway finished early Halloween. Not because he had anywhere to go or do, just that why should be have to deal with the crimes which came from too many drunken students who drank their own body weight in ‘spooky’ red dyed larger and began to fight with the young locals, also dressed up and looking for a fight. He left the station and walked down St Aldates, past miserable looking people waiting for buses home to the villages and towns to the south and west and into the far west of Midsomer too.

It was drizzling and foggy, that fine mizzle which made you damp to the skin however many layers you wore, or how waterproof your coat or umbrella. The dank, damp, seeping British weather, and the faces of the people he past were equally gloomy. It was coming up to six, too early for the drunken revellers and too late for children dressed up in cheap, shiny supermarket branded costumes, Trick or Treating. He crossed over the road at Cornmarket and popped into Wasabi and got himself a chicken ramen noodle soup, he couldn’t face cooking and could do with warming. He got it unprepared, all he needed to do was add hot water, a pot noodle but seven times the price, and hopefully twice that again in terms on healthy nutrition. He also picked up three bento boxes, and headed back to the High, and started his walk home to Iffley Road. The old soldier had his usual place on the corner of King Edward’s Street, and Hathaway gave him a bento box, five fags, a fiver and bought a Big Issue from him, despite already having two copies of that issue. Further down, huddled up under a damp quilt, was the young girl, and Hathaway gave her a bento box and fifteen for a night in the back-packers hostel. 

He crossed Magpie Lane, and saw a lonely looking woman looking sadly out of a window of the Old Bank, now a up-market restaurant, and centuries before, a hostelry, and even before that, a private house. Her costume was amazing, she had put so much work into her 17th century hair and brown dress with its lace collar, it was almost as if she was looking out through time rather than a window.

The streets were eerily empty of shoppers, tourists, and students. Buses went past, full of people, leaving the city centre and their jobs, to get to their warm and dry homes, and buses occasionally came past the other way, splashing through the puddles and making him wetter than he already was, half empty, the odd already dressed up part goer on the bus, getting in pre-drinks from cans as they stared out, empty eyed, at the cold and wet night, from a warm and dry bus. Hathaway supposed he could have caught the number 3 bus, but it seemed pointless for a less than two mile walk, and each one would be full of noisy and smelly and damp people.

As he walked past Patisserie Valerie he saw a woman dressed all in blue, in clothes looking like the came straight out of the Regency era. He guessed she was dressed up to invite people in, the sign on the window said late opening, with all kinds of Halloween iced baked goods in the window, or perhaps she was giving out leaflets for some student play or something. She looked unhappy, leaning on the wall, staring into space, and he nodded at her as he passed. She looked at him blankly, like she was looking straight through him, and he felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. Obviously, Halloween was getting to him.

The young woman who bedding down near Rose Lane was not there, but her bedding was, so he tucked the last bento box underneath it and continued on, and as he did so, he felt sure he could hear gunfire, not modern rifles or handguns, oddly it sounded like musket fire, he knew the sound from his childhood and the re-enactments at Crevecoeur his father had originally set up as a money spinner for his lordship.

He crossed Rose Lane and walked past the frontage of the entrance to the Botanical Gardens, and as he did so, he was started by an ethereal figure approaching him. The mask on this genderless person was so good, it looked as if they had no face. He hurried past quickly, his hackles rising and his temperature dropping, repeating to himself how good a costume it was he had just seen, nothing else.

As he approached Magdalen Bridge, through the increasing fog and drizzle, he thought he caught sight of a woman in a long, heavy, dress climb the balustrade and jump! Horrified, he ran to the bridge, and looked over the side, but could see nothing, nothing at all. He looked around in a panic, and as he did so, on the other end of the bridge, sitting on a wall, he saw a short black man, dressed oddly. As he watched, the man twitched, and seamed to jerk, and then fall back into the Cherwell, as if he had been shot. 

Panicked, Hathaway ran to the other end of the empty bridge, yelling on his phone,

“Inspector Hathaway. Drive by shooting, Magdelen Bridge, victim an IC3 male, shot into the Cherwell, I didn’t see the…” as he said so, he broke off, as he had got to where the man had fallen backwards, and there was nothing, no sign of anything…

“Sir? Inspector? This is Halloween, not April Fools…”

“What?”

“Is there a genuine victim, Sir?”

“No, um… that is…”

“I’m going to send a car, Sir, just in case, but this is not the first report of this shooting or falling by a black man just there. Was he wearing old-fashioned clothes, by any chance?”

“Are you telling me I saw a ghost?” he demanded of the young officer at the end of the call in Control.

“Well, yeah, I guess I am Sir.”

Hathaway paced the bridge, and looked down into the Cherwell, but he could find no sign of a shooting or a victim or any disturbance at all, and he also realised, buses had been driving past, and a couple of tramps were on the bench the other side of the road, and they were acting like the only weird thing they had seen was him run along the bridge and pace back and forth in a panic.

A patrol car arrived, and a young woman officer got out. “Inspector Hathaway, Sir? Wilson here. Can I give you a lift home?”

Hathaway took one more look about him, and said, dejectedly, “Yeah…” As a good Catholic, well, not a good one, but he wasn’t lapsed so much as not really accepted as he was, but as a believer, he didn’t think he believed in ghosts. Or didn’t think he did. The dead were at peace, or if they weren’t, they were in Purgatory or Hell, not trapped in this Earthly plane with the living.

“You’re not the first to see that,” Wilson said gently as he got into the car beside her and did up his belt. “I think it’s time breaks, not the dead haunting us – like the walls between different times are thin, and sometimes we can see through to other times. Maybe we are ghosts to others too, who knows? Do you like Doctor Who?”

Hathaway looked at the young woman and quoted, “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.” He went on, “I think maybe Quantum Leap makes more sense, with time being a long piece of sting, but both ends tied together, and then the string balled up, so bits of time touch each other – although for what you are suggesting to work, it would be less one person’s life time, that the life time of where the time breaks happen, like the life of the bridge, I guess.” He frowned. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” he quoted, just as Wilson pulled up outside his front door.

“My name’s not Horatio, it’s Kara,” Wilson deadpanned. “Try to forget it Sir. No one’s laughing at you, that I can promise, we’ve all seen weird stuff we can’t explain policing this city, it’s so old, init?”

Hathaway snorted, then coughed, and he felt like he might die of embarrassment, but said, “I shall try not to Constable. Thanks for the lift.”

Once he had got into his own, basement , flat, he remembered he had dropped his Wasabi bag with his chicken soup and tea on the bridge as he had ran to what he thought was a shooting. He flopped onto his large sofa, still in his wet things, annoyed with himself. Just then, his phone rang,

“Hathaway.”

“James, it’s Joe.”

“Sir?”

“It’s Joe. A little birdie told me you saw the dark – or black – diver. Fascinating story behind that haunting. Can I come around; I have something to show you.”

“What Sir?”

“Some paintings mostly, and a story. I’ll come over on the condition you call me Joe, at least for this evening.”

“Deal… Joe.”

“Can I bring you something?”

“I dropped my takeaway on the bridge.”

“What was it?”

“Chicken noodle soup.”

“See you in 30,” Moody said, and hung up.

By the time he arrived, James had put on dry clothes – jeans and a hoody – and towelled his hair dry, and had made a pot of tea. Moody arrived bearing Chinese and a folder.

Over soups, and fried rice, and prawn crackers, James looked at the Hogarth illustrations, a series of four called ‘Four Prints of an Election’, recognising a small, short, black man sat exactly where he had seem him fall of the bridge, while Moody explained,

“There was an election, typical pre 1832 Reform Act, rotten and corrupt to the core. Tories initially won, then the Whigs demanded a recount, and won, and went wild with celebrating, meanwhile, the Tory supporters – God alone knows fucking what is wrong with this nation – working class people who didn’t even vote – rioted and protested. One of them was a chimney sweep, well, allegedly, and he was sat on the wall of Magdalen Bridge, when a coach full of Whigs went past and one of them hung out of the window and took a pot shot of the only black man. What a surprise! A few years too late for him to be the property of another man who might have made a fuss,” Moody added, cynically. “A lot of paranormal commentators on his phenomena and social historians using Hogarth prints insist he is a chimney sweep – and perhaps he was, he’s a tiny dude, which would be an advantage before they started shoving kids up the chimneys – but they say his darkness is down to soot alone. But look at his nose, that man is an African. My dissertation was on centuries of Black Britain erased from history, it’s how I know about the prints, and the reports of seeing his shooting as a ghost over the last few decades – first written report was at least back in the 1900s. We actually have it on file, so when someone reports a shooting or a black man falling off the bridge, we can refer to it. Anyway, James, you are not the first person, or even the first officer, to see the black diver, mate. Don’t take it to heart.”

James’ lips quirked in an almost smile, but his cheeks also flushed in embarrassment, “Thank you Sir – I mean Joe.”

“Not a problem, mate, not a problem.” Moody grinned at his Inspector. It was slowly going, making friends with Hathaway, like taming a wild animal, but maybe he had made progress today.

**Author's Note:**

> 1/ The oft sighted Unfortunate Ghost of Prudence Burcote, a Puritan from a wealthy family during the Civil War (Charles I made his capital in Oxford during part of the Civil Wars and there are many, many reportings of ghosts to do with this era). She fell in love with a Royalist Officer, and her family threw her out, but the solider, billeted in barracks, returned her to her family, and she is said to have died of a broken heart. Written reports of her sighting going back to at least the Victorian era. She is seen in the building, usually standing, but sometimes gliding.  
> 2/ The blue lady is often seen, more often than not, by tourists not even realising she is a ghost, and making the same assumptions as Hathaway does. I can attest to both myself and my daughter have seen her many a time. She does just stare sadly. Why she is still there, who knows?  
> 3/ Royalists held musket practice in Rose Lane, and people do report hearing gunfire from time to time.  
> 4/ Two reported sightings of this faceless spectre of the Botanical Gardens I could find, both in the Gardens, not outside, but I take licence for Hathaway to see them. On another note, was watching Orchid Fatalis (Midsomer Murders) the other day, and noticed them trying their best in camera angles to avoid Magdalen Bridge and Tower, as they used the Hot houses as a location, lol)  
> 5/ No references to the Victorian woman jumper that I can find in any book or online, but my daughter has seen her several times on the way to Pegasus Theatre in the early morning when going to ‘college’ and also at night, on her way home late from get outs she was working on.  
> 6/ The dark (or black) diver has indeed been seen several times and witnesses do recognise him in Hogarth’s print, and historians and paranormal experts do have some contention over whether the ghost or the illustrated protester was black. There were over 1 million black men in the UK in the 18th century, so I’m with Moody. But yeah, also, interesting, isn’t it, all those protesters, and the drunken Whig arsehole thinks he’ll take a pot shot at the black one! My daughter has also seen him. And yes, they do keep a file in Oxford Police Station, have for about a century at least, with the Hogarth prints, and probably now it is digital for the 101 call handlers in Abingdon or Kidlington to access too.  
> i) Hathaway quotes the Tenth Doctor, in ‘Blink’, which we can attribute to show runner Russell T Davies or the screenplay writer, Steven Moffat, take your pick  
> ii) Um, Shakespeare, Hamlet, in case you didn’t know, lol  
> Finally, as always I put this - my illness makes me shake and hit the wrong keys a lot, and I suffer from brain fog and weirdly, swapping random words in my brain, and however many times I proof read, errors will be missed, so please, if you spot one, comment below and I shall correct it asap :)


End file.
